Children’s Literature Ambassadors: Advocates of the 1960s: Munro Leaf and Helen R. Sattley
This research period, so far, has been a fruitful one, thanks to the generous support of the Fulbright Taiwan Foundation for Scholarly Exchange. My current research project was launched when my curiosity was triggered by an unpremeditated encounter, as I was reading a historical sketch of the development of children’s literature in Taiwan, with two legendary figures who appear to be the earliest, or first, “ambassadors of children’s literature” from the United States and who introduced new concepts and visions of literature for children and young adults to Taiwanese audiences in the 1960s. This is the height of the Cold War era, but I follow Christina Klein’s view in Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, that the Cold War is to be understood not so much a limited chapter of cultural containment as a critical phase of globalization. This means that the Cold War (and its related discourses, ideologies, and the like), in effect, generated various aspects and copious practices of cultural exchanges and crossings. One such practice is the transcultural formation and institutionalization of children’s literature in postwar Taiwan. In 1964, with the sponsorship of The United Nations Children’s Fund,
